Saturday, October 11, 2008

Intellectual Property Rights - Workshop

Did you know that someone out there has even securitized an artist’s copyrights of his music? Probably not but the audience attending the IPR workshop, held on the second day of Vista, sure did. Conducted by Mr. Rahul Mehra from Evalueserve, who has been working in the field of IPR for the last 5 years, the workshop was focussed on how in the present world of fast-changing technologies, intellectual property and its protection has gained more prominence than ever before and the growing trend of monetizing it.

The workshop was extremely informative as Rahul took the audience through various types of intellectual property, differences between patents, copyrights and trademarks and provided both the global and the Indian perspective in the area. The case studies of Xerox and IBM about how they leverage their portfolio of patents to increase revenues made the session very interesting. Probably not many within the audience were aware of facts like Qualcomm earns more than $ 2 billion every year just from their patent licenses or that China currently files more patents than India on a yearly basis. The session was highly interactive as well as the audience posed a wide variety of questions ranging from why ideas can’t be patented, international patents, the patent scene in China, loopholes in the patent system (examples of patents on Basmati and Yoga) as well as questions about costs incurred in maintaining patents.

The session concluded with a discussion about how intellectual property can be valuated and the various valuation approaches. Regardless to say, the workshop was an eye-opener to all about the rapidly changing IPR scene in the country and underscored its growing importance. And yes, for those who are still wondering about the securitized music copyrights, they are no fiction-they do exist and are called Bowie bonds. Just another nugget of info from the fascinating world of IPR.

No comments: